Cannot Boot from OSX on external firewire drive

I recently bought a seagate hardrive and installed it in an external firewire casing. I partitioned it into two partitions, and installed osx 10.4.10 on one of the partitions, the same as is running on my Ti Book.
I tried selecting the os on the firewire drive as the startup disk, but when i restart, after the grey screen i get the flashing question mark icon, until the mac recognises only the default osx on the internal drive and boots with that instead.
That not working, i created a clone of my startup disk using DejaVu in my system preferences and saved it on the other, empty partition on the external drive and tried booting from that.
On restarting, i get the grey screen once again as the backlight fires up, and nothing more. the screen remains grey without any further ado until i hold the power button and force it to turn off. then as i start it up again, up comes the flashing question mark icon followed by a boot from the internal drive.
Any Solutions on this?
Many Thanks, Neptune.

Hi Dale,
Whoops- everythings not as smooth as i thought it was!
since i restored my internal drive, a lot of things have been really messed up, starting with, for example, iTunes reverting to version 4 instead of 7. that wasnt a problem, i still had the 7 installer, and soon had my whole music library back again. but the computer appears to have a problem with the handling of graphics. the finder wont create previews of even simple jpeg images, nor will it for video. quicktime wont open any video file, i get some random error message which i cant remember stating it could not open the file. and if i view my finder window in grid icon view, the usual blue mac os desktop image that i keep as a background in the finder window isnt there, instead its pitch black. same goes for the slideshow feature in the application graphic converter, i can start a slideshow and it will scroll through the images, but every image will instead be completely black. there are no scroll bars in itunes. i can scroll down randomly by clicking where the scroll bar should be, but there is nothing visual there at all, no scroll bar, no arrows. when i connect my ipod, the main ipod window of itunes wont display any graphics either, be it the picture of the ipod or the capacity bar indicating usage of the drive for music, videos, data, etc. instead, fine print says something similar to 'cannot display image, quicktime and lzw tiff decompression plugin (?) required' I cant remember word for word what it says, dont quote me on that.
the computer also came to a dead freeze twice in ten minutes, i had to hold the power button down to get it to shut off.
im sure there are other issues too which i havent yet noticed, but even these, i havent the faintest clue what could be causing them!
do you?

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